Besant, Annie

(1847–1933)

English Theosophist who caused a stir by predicting the advent of a new Messiah.
Originally Annie Wood, she married an Anglican clergyman, Frank Besant. Though soon separated from him, she continued to use her married name. She went through three major conversions, throwing herself with zeal and ability into each successive cause. First, with the freethinker Charles Bradlaugh, she campaigned for atheism and birth control. Then, she joined Bernard Shaw and others in launching the Fabian Society, a body aiming at a gradual transition to Socialism. Finally, she was won over to Theosophy by Madame Blavatsky’s book The Secret Doctrine. In 1907, she became president of the Theosophical Society. She accepted Blavatsky’s claims about mysterious “Masters” who taught her telepathically and secretly influenced the world’s destinies. According to Besant, there was a whole hierarchy of superior beings who met periodically in Shambhala, a northern holy place of Buddhist mythology, with a king called the King of the World; she made astral contact with him to seek his guidance.
In spite of the strangeness of her ideas, she was a person of powerful charisma and, in some ways, unusual practical wisdom. Under her leadership, the main body of the society held together through scandals and feuds. Deeply impressed by the affinities between Theosophical doctrines and Hinduism, she spent a long time in India developing them and played an effective though strictly constitutional part in the movement for Indian self-rule.
She was interested in the Hindu concept of avatars, incarnations of the Supreme God Vishnu. In the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu, in the form of Krishna, says: “Whenever and wherever duty decays and unrighteousness prospers, I shall be born in successive ages to destroy evil-doers and re-establish the reign of the moral law.” Thinking on similar lines, though in terms of her own ideology, Besant believed that an entity whom she called the World Teacher took human form at long intervals. He had appeared as Buddha and Christ, and he was now to appear again. At the end of 1908, she claimed to have had a revelation of this approaching event, and in the following year, she began publicly proclaiming it.
About this time, a Hindu Theosophist named Narayaniah came to live and work at the Theosophical headquarters at Adyar, near Madras. A widower, he brought four sons with him, together with other relatives. One of his sons, Jiddu Krishnamurti, was then thirteen years old. Early in 1909, several men and boys in the Adyar community used to go to the beach together and swim. They were sometimes joined by Besant’s principal colleague, C. W. Leadbeater. The first time he saw Krishnamurti, who happened to be with the party that day, he singled him out as spiritually exceptional. In the ensuing months, he made surprising discoveries about the boy’s past incarnations. Toward the end of the year, instructed by the invisible Hierarchy, Annie Besant accepted that Krishnamurti was the destined human vehicle of the World Teacher.
She adopted him legally, after difficulties with his father, and prepared him for messiahship. A special organization was formed, the Order of the Star in the East. Not all

Theosophists were compliant: this was the occasion of Rudolf Steiner’s break with the society. In 1921, however, a Dutch supporter gave the order the use of Castle Eerde, a large house near Ommen in Holland. International Star Camps were held in the grounds, at which Krishnamurti made appearances. A vision in 1922 convinced him, for the moment, that he indeed had the messianic role that was assigned to him. He traveled giving lectures. Well-known people who showed interest in the ideas he promoted included the conductor Leopold Stokowski and the former suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst. From December 1925, a change in Krishnamurti’s voice and style during his talks convinced many of his hearers that the higher being was taking possession of him. He visited the United States with much publicity and lived for a while at Ojai in California.
During the next few years, Annie Besant was busy with political activities on behalf of India, and Krishnamurti seemed less amenable. He had grown tired of being manipulated, and he laid more and more stress on the importance of people using their own judgment and not relying on his or anyone’s. At Eerde in July 1929, with notable integrity, he dissolved the order and virtually abdicated. Annie Besant never recovered. Her last prophecy, also unsuccessful, was that India would achieve self-rule before her death.
A remarkable thing in this tragicomedy was that when Leadbeater intuitively picked out a young, rather frail boy with nothing obviously special about him, his insight was—after a fashion—correct. After the abdication, Krishnamurti did go on to become a public philosopher in his own style, delivering lectures, writing books, and impressing well-known persons, Aldous Huxley among them. He mentally blocked out his Theosophical career and became unwilling to talk about it, even speaking of a kind of selective amnesia. He lived until 1986.